Preparing your labels & freezer meal bags

Preparing your labels and freezer meal bags

Hi friends! Most of my recipes here on this site are family tried, tested and loved.

Loved so much in fact I take the time to make them into a freezer meal, with recipe card, labels, calendar tags and a shopping list card. Why would I go to all that work for  food we don't even like!



To be honest, it has taken me alot of years trying to learn how best I want to keep, file, or store our family's most loved and often used recipes. I love to cook, try new foods and I have a GOB of papers floating around with yummy sounding food printed on them. I have even more book marked or "pinned" and as we find family "keepers". For a while now I have been starting to set them in stone on recipe cards. I love this! It is a bit of work, but work I never have to do again. I order them at the printers, and add them to my little dollar store photo books or save them to my tablet or Evernotes. Never to be lost, always handy. And the best part is I can share them with you! And my kids who are just starting on their own, soon to have families of their own one day.

1. Print Labels - To get prepared to have some super yummy freezer meals, I print off my label cards. You can do this simply by printing them (there is a button at the very bottom of this post that will print the whole post, and any of them, allowing you to click/delete anything you don't want to print) OR you can save them to your computer, upload it to a Walgreens near you, or your favorite/cheapest place to print and print them as a 4x6 photo. Remember for every 2 freezer meals you make you will need a Label card.

2. Laminate - After you have your labels printed, cut them up and laminate them. You don't have to laminate them, but this way you NEVER have to make them again. If you don't have a lamenting machine, then simply use packing tape and tape both sides. I love getting my laminating sheets at Sam's club working out to be 10 cents a sheet.

3. Tape to gallon freezer bag - I simply take one strip of packing tape and tape my label to my bag. Do this on the bottom half, just in case your meal has so little you can fold it in half (see my photo below. Some of them I fold in half and put them in front because they are super skinny marinade meals)

4. Label bag with a permanent marker. These labels are amazing. Removing them to reuse them is amazing, however, sometimes they remove themselves in shuffling around the freezer. PLEASE take a few extra seconds to label them so that if you find there is no label you do not have a mystery dinner, never to be used. Writing the title of your recipe on the bottom also serves to help you find your meals easier, without having to pull them out to read the labels.

Have fun!